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Wittgenstein's idea "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" inspires us to ask ourselves if the means of communication and the code intervene in the construction of our world. This is the premise from which we started to develop this paper, considering that a formal system and formalization (a term used in an extended sense) not only have the role of solving specific problems but also radically modify the epistemic universe - "epistema", (from the perspective of the object and the subject) in which manifests. It is emphasized the idea of formalization is used broadly. This required a definition of the term, developed in the paper's first part. After, we underline the importance of writing, analyzing Plato's myth of Theuth. To support our point of view, we refer to some examples of the "epistema" metamorphosis that have as their cause the changes of a formal system, in this case, writing. The example from this article is Hangeul writing. In the framework of the paper, we analyze four directions of the epistema change: communicational, axiological, aesthetic, and socialpolitical, pointing out how these changes occurred within the Korean writing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the whole pandemic and especially during the period from March 2020 to the summer of the same year, when many countries saw general lockdowns, persons working in the field of entertainment faced a debilitating blow. One such group consisted of the street musicians of Athens, whom I had studied as part of a European program conducted under the auspices of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The present paper has multiple aims. It looks at the matter of how far research carried out over the internet is effective and academically valid and it also examines the subject of the emotional world of those taking part in this process. More particularly, the paper attempts to throw into relief the feelings and emotions of researchers and, secondarily, the feelings of the informants who participated in research through the platforms Webex, Zoom and Skype. The research had started at the end of 2019 and involved fieldwork on one of the streets of central Athens, but, with the onset of Covid was subsequently conducted solely over the internet for several months until the summer of 2020. When in November 2020 another lockdown was imposed, I reverted once more to the internet as my sole research tool. By reference to interviews between informant and researcher, I tried to touch on matters of ethics and the thoughts and worries of researchers on the matter. Through reference, too, to interviews with informants, I tried to throw light on the thoughts and reflections that researchers entertain regarding their work and the problems that they faced during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first months of 2020, the whole world was affected by the restrictions caused by the authorities' attempts to stop the spread of SarsCov2 as far as possible. Initially, the most effective measure was quarantine, which could slow the spread of the virus. In Romania, the first case of Covid19 was confirmed on 23 February 2020, and after a period of hesitation, the national authorities imposed the quarantine on 15 March, i.e., a series of restrictions on the movement of persons and on participation in events involving more than eight persons. Obviously, the introduction of this special regime for the movement of persons affected all areas of social and economic life, including its vital branches, such as the industrial and educational activity. Of course, under these conditions, the first temptation of any ethnologist was to observe the transformations of the rhythms of life, practicing a kind of armchair ethnography and transforming into the observed "field" even their own home, their own life or the lives of those close to them, but also what came to them from the outside world via online. In contrast to these approaches, this paper studies several cases where, through contractual obligations, the ethnologist had to do the field in the classical sense of the term, i.e. to observe real (not virtual) communities, located far away (even geographically), and to participate in their social and cultural life. The constraints imposed by quarantine practically forced ethnological fieldwork to reinvent itself, making researchers reflect on the criteria for selecting their informants under the new conditions, on the manner of interacting with them, on the logistics involved in producing interviews and, last but not least, on the ethical implications of approaches of this kind. The remote field experiences of two projects were presented and analyzed: Educational and Networking Tools on Development of Authentic Performance for Professional Integration - PAN and Colecție digitală a patrimoniului alimentar românesc si transfer spre societate -- FOODie. Analyzing in particular the interviews conducted in the FOODie project, the paper highlights a number of advantages of remote fieldwork, such as: the possibility to overcome quarantine restrictions, the possibility to make a quality video recording, the openings of a collaborative ethnology. A number of difficulties of this type of remote research are also highlighted, such as: communication difficulties due to lack of direct interaction, internet signal fluctuation problems, difficulties in understanding some aspects due to ignorance of the informant's living space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at briefly outlining some of the most important and challenging linguistic particularities in retranslating Shakespeare's sonnets into Romanian by Constantin Manea. The method employed involves selecting various sonnets and analyzing them from a quantitative and qualitative perspective, which provides a clear and large coverage of syntactic and semantic manifestations in operating a translational transfer from English to Romanian. The main purpose of the study is therefore not to compare the collected data to older retranslations of the sonnets, but to pinpoint some of the exact linguistic nuances involved in retranslating Shakespeare into Romanian in the 21st century, which can ultimately help readers better understand Shakespeare's originality. The overarching idea behind this paper draws on Lawrence Venuti's three essential principles in retranslating literature, agency, intertextuality and history, which are used to determine the level of value that Constantin Manea created in retranslating Shakespeare's sonnets into Romanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to describe the Information Structure (IS) of Romanian negative statements by using an F0 contour interpretation at the cognitive level. The IS analysis of contours is based on a cognitive (pre-linguistic) model. The descriptions of IS partitions deduced from F0 contours are then related to the semantic aspects of the negation phenomenon: the phrase accent and the focus position of the new information element within the rheme part of sentence. Important prosodic characteristics are added to those presented in Dascălu-Jinga 2001 şi Dascălu-Jinga 1998 related to Romanian intonational contours of negative sentence utterances. The new aspect introduced by the paper in the F0 contour analysis is the cognitive IS model which interprets melodic forms of prosodic words as functional element marks. In section 2 the IS model at the cognitive level is presented by defining information unit, the two structural levels and nuclear accent rules. The model can describe a cognitive reality of information packaging within utterances that is different from the syntactic and semantic organization of sentences. In section 3 are presented 5 utterances of negative sentences. After their F0 contours partitioning, IS model-based descriptions are applied to the resulted partitions and they can explain how is implemented at the pragmatic level the semantic focus function of the constituent which is responsible from the non-realization of the action within negative sentence. The examples of negative sentences include cases where the negation particle bears only acoustic prominence (constituent negation) and others, where it also bears functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic IS level. In the latter case, the particle nu negates the whole sentence and it has a positive acoustical prominence (melodic peak) and a functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic level. The F0 contour analysis leads to the conclusion that focus event usually shares the same position with the nuclear element within one partition but there are cases when they have different positions. This is an argument to treat them as different structural aspects of utterances at the semantic level and at the information packaging level, respectively. We conclude that the paper is useful for students and linguist researchers who are interested to deepen the comprehension of the pragmatic realization of the negation phenomenon within Romanian utterances by identifying the IS partition hierarchy of utterances at the cognitive level, including local and global nuclear elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the terminology designating humours as it appears in Romania. From medicine to literature, from the Hippocratic theory of the four humours (umori) to the etymological doublet umor, this research paper will investigate the semantic and onomasiological fluctuations of three lexical fields: umoare (fluid), umoare (temperament) and umor (humour). The study does not aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of the terms (and their contexts) belonging to these semantic categories, but to identify the terms denoting the three concepts and their evolution in the Romanian language in its process of modernisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which transfers the terms Germanus - Romanus from Western to Southeastern Europe, with a particular focus on Romania and Hungary, proposes an etymological analysis of the Hungarian ethnonyms német and oláh and the Slavic ethnonym vlah while documenting their emergence in surnames from Romania and Germany. The Germans call themselves Deutsche and their language deutsch, from the Germanic *theudiska, Middle Latin theodiscus, diutiscus (meaning 'pertaining to one's own people'), Old German diutisk, and Middle German diut(i)sch, tiutsch. Other peoples gave them names that referred to their tribes (e.g., French allemands, Finnish saxa, Serbian bavaraci) or their behaviour (e.g., Slavic nemcy, which initially meant 'foreigner, speaker of another language, one who does not speak Slavic, dumb' and later also acquired the meaning of 'German'). In order to differentiate themselves from the Romanic peoples and their languages, the Germans started using the word welsch (Old German wal(a)hisc, 11th century) to refer to anything 'Romanic'; later on, during the 14th century, the term acquired the figurative meaning of 'foreign, incomprehensible'. The Old German noun wal(a)h(a) (meaning 'Roman'), Middle German walch, walhe, comes from the name of the Celtic tribe Volcae, which lived in the vicinity of the Germanic peoples (Latin Volcae, Germanic *Walhos). In Eastern Europe, the ethnic Germans colonized during the 12th century were called němici (Russian nemetz, Bulgarian němec, Albanian nemets) by the Slavic population, the word bearing the same meaning as in Western Europe, i.e., 'foreigner, incomprehensible, barbarian, dumb', and later 'German'. The Romanians were named with the Slavic term vlah(u), Hungarian oláh, Transylvanian Saxon dialect Bloch, meaning 'pertaining to the Romanic peoples and Romance languages', which in turn is a loanword from the Germanic languages - see Old German terms wal(ah)isc (Romanic) and walhos (Roman) that reached the Slavic peoples of the Balkans through the language of the Goths. A close examination of the surnames Nemet(h), Olah, and Vlah listed in the Romanian Telephone Directories from 2009-2010 confirms their geographical spread throughout the Romanian-Hungarian border regions, as well as in Transylvania, Maramureș, Crișana, Banat, and Bucharest. The final part of the paper analyzes the corpus of the names Nemeth, Olah, and Vlah and their variants, as listed in the onomastic database of the German Surname Atlas. With the help of a special electronic program, we managed to map the names and thus obtain the geography of each of the types of names mentioned above. The map reveals that all three types of surnames are concentrated in the same regions of Germany, namely in its southern, south-western and western territories, in the heavily industrialized areas of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf-Dortmund-Duisburg, Nuremberg, and Munich. To conclude, it can be stated that surnames represent a linguistic treasure that preserves states of the languages from the Middle Ages. They can also provide important information on the migration of peoples. The contrasting pair of terms Germanus versus Romanus from Western Europe, mirrored in the pairs of surnames Niemietz, Nimsch, Nemetz versus Welsch, Welscher, Wallisch has a corresponding pair of Hungarian, Romanian, Slavic and Greek names in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Nemeth versus Olah and Vlach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elsa Triolet (1896-1970) was the first woman to win the Goncourt Prize for Literature. She was not only a writer. Also, she was a journalist, a literary and theater critic, a translator from Russian into French and from French into Russian. The subject of our research in this paper is her translation work. Almost all of the author's translation work is included in the research, which is divided into several parts. The first part includes her earliest translations. The following is a section on her translations of Mayakovsky into French. Elsa Triole self-translated her novels written in Russian into French. We consider this segment of her work in the special part of the paper. Elsa's thoughts on translating poetry and prose from one language to another are presented in the final part of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is a short history of the Academic teaching of Romanian language and literature in Berlin since the foundation of the Romance Languages Studies. Romanian appears for the first time as an academic curricula at the beginning of the 20th century at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University which after WW II was called Humboldt-University and remained in the eastern sphere after the division of the city of Berlin in east and west. In 1949 the Freie University of Berlin will be established in the western part of the city with support of the US-Government. From this moment on, we have two academic institutes for Romance languages in Berlin offering Romanian Studies, one in the Eastern and one in the Western part of the city. This paper highlights the personalities and their activities in the development of the curricula of these studies in the historical context from the social and political standpoint. We give an outline of how the Romanian teaching developed after the Fall of Berlin Wall and at what point we are now today. Hariton Tiktin was the first scholar to found the department of Romanian language at the Berlin University. Despite his valuable contribution through his comprehensive dictionary, his academic personality has gone forgotten. Tiktin was followed in the 1930s by Ernst Gamillscheg, an Austrian with strong sympathies for the upcoming national-socialist and fascist politics. Retrospectively his academic role in the two decades has been subject to controversy. The second half of this period is also marked by the Romanian linguist Sextil Pușcariu, that was active in Berlin as an academic scholar, being a guest lecturer at the University and as a founder of the Romanian Cultural Institute. The Ending of the War was characterized by a denazification of the academic world, and shows that the measures have never been consistent. The case Bucur is just a tragic academic anecdote. The Afterwar finds the Cold War represented by two competing Universities, and each of them had a Romanian department. On one hand in the western Free University Romanian was focused on Eastern European Studies and in the context of the Romance Philology as well, on the other hand in the Humboldt University the emphasis was on Language Studies and Translation. With the Fall of the Berlin Wall there is a slow change in the curricula reducing Romanian Studies in both Universities to the point that Romanian has been given up in the Free University. The Romanian Studies are still vivid at the Humboldt University but not as independent subject. It is part of different Bachelor and Master-Studies and is open to a wide variety of study subjects and also to all German students from other Universities of the region. At the End of the Essay there is a short analysis of the students interested in the subject, which leads to some conclusions about the future development of the Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gynocritical study of Anna Terék's latest book of poems, Dead Women (2017) is an analysis based on the outline of a subcultural framework of feminine experience. The string of poems is narrated by women in times of war, sickness, adultery, cruelty and aggression. The poems are told by women from an unconventional perspective. The traumas of the characters are persistent and cannot be overcome in a lifetime, thus they are "dealt with" after their death. This way Terék touches upon a key element of feminist criticism, "the art of dying". Suicide appears as a solution, as well as something natural and an act of free choice. Another topics that emerge in the poems are matrophobia, adultery, identity, patriarchal relations. Along with the intrinsic analysis of Terék's poetry, the paper also touches upon the ideology and history of development of the female literary tradition, biological determinism and limitations of gynocriticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, the author aims to continue the detailed analysis of the inherited Latin adjectives used adverbially in Romanian in order to highlight the lexical-semantic and functional features of the word adevăr 'really' in the ancient period, when it had different uses. The starting point for the analysis was some previous contributions, in whose pages aspects concerning adjectives with similar morphosyntactic behavior have been described, some of them, at that time, being presented sequentially, revealing the typological characteristics of the class and less the morphological or the phraseological (implicitly prepositional) variation of each lexical unit. The choice of this adverbial adjective as the main topic of the current analysis is also explained by the fact that, in ancient texts, its number of occurrences was relatively significant because it was often found in the structure of adverbial phraseological units. For a proper interpretation, the author uses a corpus of ancient language (SOR Corpus), which facilitates an objective analysis of language facts. It also refers to similar studies and dictionaries of Romance languages to show the similarities between them, more exactly similar uses, confirming the unity of the Neolatin idioms regarding the adverbials. In this paper, the author will prioritise several perspectives: the etymological, the Romance, the morphological, the structural and the syntactic. The main aim is to illustrate the dynamics of this adverb in the ancient language, which was, naturally, much more striking than nowadays. This analysis will undoubtedly make it possible to identify certain constants and relate them to other adverbial adjectives in order to confirm or refute some trends in the language or to seek the fixing of some structures or the generalization of some particular phraseological variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how written corrective feedback was provided during the online teaching of Romanian as a foreign language at an Italian university in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The retrospective analysis focuses on the most common types of mistakes identified in the students' homework and on the strategies applied by the author as the lecturer for Romanian language in the revision of the homework. The first part of the research aimed to identify and classify the errors appearing in the students' texts, investigating the possible causes of the errors. The findings revealed that grammar errors were made more frequently by the students at beginner level, while lexical errors were made by students at an intermediate or advanced level of knowledge. Results also show that the teacher tended to use various types of corrective feedback, depending on the error type that was identified. The teacher's feedback took different forms, ranging from simple error correction to extended comments and the proposal of alternative solutions. Moreover, the corrective feedback was offered directly for beginner students, while the corrections tended to be hedged when addressing advanced students, in order to avoid their discouragement. The students found the teacher's feedback useful and even used the homework as a means to signal their difficulties with learning and ask for help. These results contradict previous research claiming that effective feedback involved direct indications using the imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the report the Secretary General Xi Jinping delivered at the 19th Party Congress, the paper analyzes the relation between traditional culture and socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. Since socialism with Chinese characteristics has always been discursively related to the Chinese tradition and political speeches abound in references to tradition, we intend to find out what role tradition plays in the "new era" and what makes it important. The paper discusses the relation between the guiding Marxist ideology and tradition and looks at how the importance of tradition is explained to the masses by employing ritualistic formulae. The analysis is based on the elite political discourse and subsequent academic discourse acting as commentaries to the political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aimed to shed light on how preparatory year programmes for foreign languages capitalize on the multilingual competences of participating students. More specifically, we examined the way in which students enrolled in a preparatory year programme for foreign languages may resort to multilingual competences to facilitate learning of a new language which, in turn, facilitates integration in a foreign education and labour market. Firstly, we briefly touched upon the benefits of multilingualism and multiculturalism. Within the background of the increased globalized world of the 21st century, multicultural and multilingual skills represent a pathway to successful integration of people from all over the globe who have been moving (more or less) freely to pursue their personal and professional goals, to explore opportunities for their development and enhanced satisfaction of ever more complex needs. These skills can be developed by one's active involvement in learning languages, with the latter seen as instruments for acquiring complex knowledge of the target culture. When learning and using a language, we become aware not only of its morphological and syntactic structures but also of the realities and abstract representations encoded by it. Hence, the more languages one comes to be proficient in, the more complex one's understanding of the world, as seen through as many lenses as languages mastered and used to glimpse at the world. Against this background, the European Union has embraced linguistic diversity as "[o]ne of the cornerstones of the European project." Several studies have highlighted the way in which mastery of several languages contributes to people's successful integration in the societies they choose to study and work in. Secondly, we pointed to the existence of several types of preparatory or foundation year programmes in Europe - and pointed to the fact that they may be used to provide training in languages and/or basic knowledge in a certain field that may be chosen for further education. There are (at least) two types of study programmes known as 'foundation year programmes' or 'preparatory year programmes'. On the one hand, there are preparatory year programmes designed to equip future students with basic knowledge in a certain field so that they may pursue a Bachelor's degree programme in the respective field); on the other hand, there are preparatory year programmes designed to teach aspiring students the language of the country where they wish to attend Bachelor's/Master's/Doctoral study programmes. In our paper, we focused only on the preparatory year programmes of the second type and provided a few examples of such preparatory year programmes. Thirdly, we focused on the Preparatory Year of Romanian Language for Foreign Citizens organized by the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE), Romania, a programme which we referred to as APLR ASE. This programme was authorized in 2014 and accredited in 2017. In the period 2014-2019, APLR ASE enrolled more than 320 students from more than 30 countries across the globe. We described the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds of participants, the languages used in the teaching process, the opportunities for graduates' insertion in the Romanian education and labour markets. We illustrated how these diverse backgrounds, which require the use of several languages during instruction, facilitate understanding not only of Romanian linguistic, cultural, and professional realities, but also of those of participants' countries of origin. This, in turn, helps APLR ASE students better integrate in the Romanian education and labour markets, where not only mastery of (general and specialized) Romanian is required, but also mastery of other languages, as well as of intercultural and transversal competences (cf. Pătru et al., 2018, Dima, Mohanu et al., 2019, Mohanu et. al, 2019). As a conclusion, we expressed our firm belief that preparatory year programmes may contribute to the formation and development of multilingual individuals, equipped with: (foreign) language skills, a variety of intercultural skills, and a set of attitudes that are conducive to their inclusion on the education and labour markets of the destination countries, as well as to their active participation in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic aim of this article is to establish the place the cultural element holds within the triad cultural awareness, cultural competence and cultural literacy, on the background of a multinational class in which a foreign language is taught and its momentum in the teaching process, but only after clearly delineating the core features of each concept, as well as their logical sequentiality. Founding the research on a corpus of answers collected from candidates to learning Romanian as a foreign language regarding their reasons and motivation to approach its study, and considering a whole body of examples gathered as a result of our first-hand experience in teaching Romanian as a foreign language, the paper also discusses the connection between society, language and culture. But, most importantly, this study puts forward the concept of culturacy, a term originally coined from cultural literacy, as the fifth and compulsory element to be included in the set of skills of foreign language learning. The limitations are, for the moment, connected to the approach culturacy can have in assessment, but the forthcoming paper, focused on establishing a solid profile of the cultural element in teaching a foreign language, has already considered this aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors' aim was to revisit a few aspects, as well as some types of observations concerning the phenomenon of massive penetration of the Anglo-American lexicon into Romanian, which were also addressed in some of their previous papers. In this article, emphasis is placed on the reality of translation, as a vehicle, and a linguistic and cultural mechanism by means of which such Anglicisms are taken over. The authors did not intend to insist on the normative perspective, which they dealt with only in a collateral manner, as a matter of principle. Instead, a perspective on the strategies of translation (cf. L. Venuti) was addressed, which can be subsumed into the opposition between domestication and foreignization - in keeping with which the penetration of many "barbarisms" in Romanian (with results that are more than evident in the Englished neologistic vocabulary used in thousands of texts, especially in the sphere of the media and in the webosphere) can be assimilated with the latter option - i.e. it can be (also) considered a matter of strategy, thus a conscious choice. Numerous examples were provided, excerpted from the authors' remarks and notes over the years, based on corpora consisting of own selections from various linguistic material, while, in parallel, it was argued that, as often as not, these results unfortunately prove to be (also - or especially) a matter of competence. In other words, it is ignorance that urges the (superficial, hasty or poorly trained) translator to provide versions that are simply wrong - at least in terms of the linguistic standards or norms in force -, many of them representing cases of semantic ambiguity, nay even involuntary humor -, or else real "howlers". Despite the general belief that language standardization should enjoy a tolerance of a cultural, and also human type, indiscriminately and unwisely introducing some neologisms which prove to be, after all, mere barbarisms, is tantamount to speaking and writing with words that actually do not (yet) exist in our language. Of course, the fact, which can be easily seen, that the linguistic sensitivity of the average Romanian speaker has declined to a great extent is worrying - and therefore many quite recent Anglicisms arising through loan translation are virtually accepted unreservedly. We believe that the illustrations provided in this paper will be likely to give a rather detailed, though naturally limited, picture of the role of translation (not necessarily literary translation - and often not admitted as such), within the complex and intense process, manifested especially in recent decades, amounting to enriching Romanian both lexically and semantically, based on Anglo-American sources, in the wider context of the growing linguistic and cultural globalization in today's world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of culture and civilization elements in the process of learning Romanian as a foreign language is still lacking and controversial. Either the course support is not conceived from a cultural perspective that is ample enough - the theory behind this probably being that the access to a foreign culture is impossible as long as the linguistic barrier persists, or the „modern identity complex", characteristic to the 19th and 20st centuries makes the presentation of the Romanian culture to ignore the anthropological, behavioral, daily, lived culture and lingers in the area of the national canon, of its personalities and monuments, that are considered to be, on a local level, to be representative. This paper presents the arguments and the ways for understanding language as a binomial object of teaching and learning, made up from an idiom and a culture, on all levels, starting from the beginner and up to the advanced level. We follow the development of this idea in the field of teaching French as a foreign language, starting with the 1970s and offer the examples of the manuals, teaching materials and curriculum programs for the French language, culture and civilization. Teaching the Romanian language, culture and civilization needs to reach the same standards. This paper does not only reflect upon the methodological orientation, but also on gradual contents and the ethos that might consolidate the specialized Romanian culture and civilization courses for foreigners. The desire to learn a foreign language does not only mean, in a restrictive sense, mastering grammar and vocabulary, but also the capacity to sink into a new culture, discovering new ways of understanding and acting, acquiring a secondary identity and an elective homeland, the consciousness of an enhanced, more informed and vivid presence in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent reflections on the return of the aesthetics (Michael Bérubé, Vincent Jouve) have triggered debates in French and American cultural contexts on the need to re-evaluate the literary according to a set of contingent criteria. The paper investigates the impact of these theoretical debates on literary studies in the post-2000 period, by questioning the concept of value in the field of postcolonial studies (concerned with the relation between high and low culture), new reception theories (preoccupied with the revival of the „aesthetic emotion") and the ideology of literature. On the one hand, the article Debates on Literary Value in Contemporary Theory shows that postcolonial studies have never ceased to functionalize value principles. Recent American theorists (Martha Nussbaum, Rita Felski) have maintained the utility of the literary work by redefining the readers' interaction with the literary work. The concepts of selfidentification or self-problematization become central in the postcolonial axiology. On the other hand, French theorists openly state the conjunction of aesthetics with other disciplines like sociology or cognitive psychology (Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Yves Citton). The paper holds that the extension of the notion of „aesthetic experience" (Marielle Macé) over domains of experience unacknowledged by the tradition of literary studies („democratic experience" or „cognitive experience") is part of the same attempt to redefine literary value on new theoretical grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze a recent translation into French of some of the poems written by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu: Poeme/Poèmes, published in 2018 by Muzeul Literaturii Române Publishing House. The translation is signed by Liliana Cora Foşalău. In the first part of the study we examine some critical opinions concerning previous translations into French of Eminescu's poetry. In the second part we discuss the translator's note included in this new edition. The third and last part of the paper is represented by the critical assessment of the translation that represents the main item of the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents Sanda Golopenția's professional paths in relation to the main theoretical and methodological perspectives explored by the Brown University professor during her remarkable career. Attracted early on to foreign languages both within her family and at school, Golopenția became a linguist and a folklorist and navigated easily between the two disciplines. During the 1960s and 1970s, fieldwork undertaken in various rural Romanian regions aroused an interest in language dynamics, conversational memory, and the nature of speaker creativity in linguistics innovation. The village of Breb in Maramureș becomes the locus amoenus of her anthropological fieldwork, where Golopenția discovers and conceptualizes the speech acts of a close-knit community. In the field of linguistics, the professor of French Studies is drawn to the theory of structural linguistics, generative grammar, and pragmatics, while also analysing folklore texts and literary works with the help of linguistic tools. Within folkloristics, she is mostly interested in the study of charms and charming from a general anthropological and pragmatic point of view, highlighting the special type of intelligence that folk magic reveals. One of the main concepts that she proposes, intermemory – grounded in the conversational histories of the people of Breb – accurately defines many of her intellectual interests and also the deep structure of the content of her edited works. In Romanian sociology, Golopenția is appreciated for publishing the books of her parents, Anton Golopenția and Ștefania Cristescu – two principal members of the Sociological School that was led by D. Gusti, thereby recovering a lost connection with interwar sociology. Finally, the author describes her encounter with the works of Sanda Golopenția, as well as a personal meeting with the esteemed professor. Given the occasion of this paper – the celebration of Golopenția's 80th birthday – the text is a general appreciation of her many contributions to Romanian culture, which could be defined appropriately in terms of what Claude Levi-Strauss called a "humanist anthropology". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works on spatiality have proven that space is not a fixed and unchangeable but rather a fluid and mobile reality. This relativity of space has taken out space from the auspices of Kantian apriorism and the philosophy of positivism and signalled that it is a controversial juxtaposition of the real and the fictional, of perception and representation, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Michel de Certeau assertes that space has to be understood as a "spatial practice", meaning that it is modulated by the spatial representations of the dweller. That points to the utility and practicability of space as opposed to a dominant supersaturated space that speaks in local laws. The "spatial practice" dilutes the frontiers and communicates to other spaces, from which results the transgressive quality of space. Having this spatial theory as a starter point, this paper points out the significance of storytelling as a marker for space. As de Certeau states out, storytelling invents space, because it has no hermeneutical encoding and only may be understood as a "making-do" process which says what it says without additional meaning. The focus of this paper is to analyze the stories of two Moldavian authors, Mihail Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu. Storytelling becomes for the two writers a way to relocate the periphery into the center as Moldova has lost its political and cultural importance towards the capital Bucharest. Storytelling becomes marginality, a genius loci that carves a local specificity. The territory is mapped in fictional stories in which memory works as a catalyzer. De Certeau thinks that memory is the connection between storytelling and space because it modifies and constructs space according to the laws of the narrative. Memory is indeed an important issue in the stories picked up for analysis: Moldova becomes a fictional space for Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu, the territory of passed glorious rulers, decadent boyars and archaic myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to pay homage at the aniversary of Sanda Golopenția- Eretescu, Professor Emeritus at the Department of French Studies, Brown University of Providence USA, a writer, linguist, semiotician, ethnologist and translator. We focus on her professional activity, especially on papers that were published in translation into the Hungarian language in Romania and Hungary. In the present article I discuss translations of her work that were published in Hungarian as well as reviews published in Hungarian volumes and journals that appeared at the height of Romanian structuralism, a period when Hungarian philologists showed a special interest towards the research carried by Sanda Golopenția in the 1960's and 1970's, i.e. the period before she left communist Romania. I searched for proof and results of the Hungarian – Romanian co-operation and of the attention paid by Hungarian critics, whether they knew Romanian or not, towards the Romanian theoretical and critical literary phenomenon from that period. I revealed especially the cooperation between Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu and the Hungarian ethno-semiotician Vilmos Voigt and the prestigious Hungarian journal "Etnographia", as well as that between her and outstanding personalities of Hungarian philology in Romania: Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Zoltán Szabó, Olga Murvai. After Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu left Romania in 1980, neither the Hungarian publications, nor the Romanian journals showed any interest in her activity. However, the notes, reviews, translations she wrote during the two decades in which she focused on structuralism and semiotics, either in relation with literature and linguistics, or with the research of folklore were known in the Hungarian cultural environment. Adding to the hundreds of references from her professional bibliography previous to her exile from her native country; they offer a perspective on the intellectual collaboration between Romanian and Hungarian specialists in the field from a period of – apparent – political detente during the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Year's Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Year's Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly "irrational" popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Year's Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the "performers" got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Year's Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the second in a series I am planning to write on reading in the digital age. The first one entitled "On Books and Reading" looked into the evolution of books and paradigms of reading in the last approximately three hundred years. It served as a prelude to an endeavour that aims to capture a very dynamic phenomenon, which is that of reading in the digital age. In November 2014 I joined a COST action whose objective is to assess the impact of digitisation on reading. Since research in this field is underway, both questions and answers are tentative. There are upsides and downsides to reading both in print and on screens. Reading paper books, and since the advent of print, printed books has shaped our reading and even our thinking habits. Nevertheless, e-readers are a recent invention with considerable benefits. The transition from paper book reading to e-reading is double-edged. E-readers and other digital devices are light and portable, but reading on screens may be confusing, disorienting, and it may have a negative impact on cognitive and emotional aspects of reading, which are serious downsides. On the other hand, reports show that owners of digital devices read more in either medium, and it seems that the new products designed especially for digital use are not texts in the traditional sense. It may also be that getting used to and accepting the new digital devices and applications may take some time. Adapting them to our reading habits may also take time. Alternatively, they may change our reading habits dramatically, or the future may be paper for texts and digital for more interactive products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597) was one of the most important Spanish humanists of the 16th century and his works embarked almost all genres available during his lifetime: from poetry to poetic theory, and historical prose to critical bibliography. Even if many of his productions were lost or destroyed after his death, and even if several polemical episodes aimed at ravaging his literary projections, he was much appreciated as a great erudite and scholar by many of his contemporaries and later, along the centuries, by various European men of letters. Nevertheless, his full consecration took place during the 20th century, beginning with the generation of French Hispanists and culminating with Sevillian philologists eager to pay his due homages. This paper is aiming at synthesizing and classifying this prodigious critical production concerning the writings of Fernando de Herrera and offers an overview of the main lines of investigation that scholars of Herrera approached during the 20th century, having thus secured a well-built foundation for the studies emerging in the new millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to analyse from a pragmalinguistic point of view the promise and the oath as discursive genres located at the individual level of language. We take into consideration the mechanisms by which they are constituted and the functions they update in communication. To promise and to swear are two performative verbs with semantic repercussions on the success or failure of communication. They not only have a simple role to play in "how to do things with words", but they also lead the way in fulfilling the commitments that, once verbalized, become part of the world around them. The violation of promises and oaths "flagellates" the language regarding the two verbs mentioned above because they announce exactly this judgement: the transformation of language into an act of creation. The consequences of non-compliance with this moral law may also affect the receiver: whoever commits perjury is rejected by the community they used to belong to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Mircea Eliade is a personality deeply connected to Romanian thought and literature and a globally renowned author dealing with man's religious and literary capacities, perceived as hallmarks of human existence, our paper took advantage of some of his insights, which have been useful as implemented in the process of teaching literature and culture. Methodologically speaking, today's tendency, of reducing literary phenomena to mere diachronic and 'archeological' perspectives, founded on the historicist and positivistic thought of the 19th century, needs reviewing. Old and modern literatures, as well as myth must be considered from a wider, transcultural perspective and as related to man's existential, ontological issues, which have always been present as such, both in homo religiosus and/or the modern laic man. Such critical standpoint opens the way for the students to apprehend myth, religion and (old) literature as related to man's creativity, i.e. to his permanent need to imagine, in the course of time, different ontological 'true stories', which describe reality and existence as related to human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginning of the pandemic in Romania, similar to other countries, brought confusion, anguish and forces reclusion. However, mediated communication indicated an increase in the co-creation of content, leading to a great number of memes tackling the new lack of sociality environment. This paper proposes the analysis of the first months of pandemic memes using the theories of coping mechanisms and frame creation to map the digital response to the new events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an important personality of Romanian classical philology. Professor Mihaela Paraschiv is a complex personality that combines linguistic rigor with a special literary sensibility. The article lists all the fields in which this professor from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi asserted herself. I emphasize that she made important contributions of a linguistic nature, she analyzed important aspects of ancient literary works and of Italian and Romanian humanism and made numerous translations from ancient Greek and Latin for the first time in Romanian. At the same time, she carried out an exceptional didactic activity, some of her former students becoming personalities in the field of classical philology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emotional and psychological dimensions of the Covid-19 pandemic would have to be further examined, especially by scholars equipped to explain the psychosocial impact of this situation on individuals and communities. The paper discusses a specific secondary effect of the public health communication system informing on the spread of the disease through statistics and numbers. For the strategic communicators to appropriately frame their key messages, understanding the variety of ways by which people may be affected not only physically, but also psychologically, by the provided data during a global health crisis is of outmost importance and would support the correct responses and adjustments to mitigate the inevitable anxiety. The comparison of the "mathematical" display of the pandemic with the rhetorical trope of "counting" present in a charm-type offers a fresh perspective on how disease is conceived and alleviated in different historical times, and how collective fears may have a strong impact on preventive behavior and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to a translation analysis of the French version of the Akathist Hymn to the "Burning Bush" (Rugul Aprins), written between 1945 and 1958, by the poet, who became a monk, Daniil Sandu Tudor, imprisoned by the authorities of the communist regime for his religious, mystical beliefs. Initiator of the hesychast movement "The Burning Bush" from the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, he died at the Aiud Prison, in 1962. It is a translation of the first version of this Akathist, spread in France between 1958-1960, through father Andre Scrima, who otherwise participated in conceiving it, together with father archimandrite Placide Deseille, at that time a Catholic monk in the great Abbey of Bellefontaine. It is mentioned the context in which this translation appeared, with regard to the reasons on which it is based and there are thoroughly analyzed the French versions of the first Kontakion and of the third Ikos. The analysis focuses on the translation principles used by the father translator, the literality observed with discernment and the translation creativity and insists on the expressiveness and the semantic explicitation of numerous translation options. In addition, the analysis envisages the translation strategies of some important theological themes, profoundly spiritual, covered by this Akathist. The main purpose of translating this text in French language is that of using it, through reading, as a means of prayer by the French and Francophone believers, who became Orthodox through conversion. It is surprising the fact that this Akathist, the most profoundly spiritual and mystic from al the Akathist hymns included in the Orthodox hymnography of these two cultures, Romanian and French, was translated in French language since 1960, soon after its creation, being published in an Occidental society, deeply secularized and generally, incompatible with any form of mysticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the various forms of kitsch - aesthetic kitsch, social kitsch, tourist kitsch and kitsch-world - in the theoretical and poetic texts of A.E. Baconsky. His essays on the new poetic paradigm interrogate the forms of mimetic kitsch, seen as part of an extensive metamorphic process of aesthetic thinking throughout the '50s-'60s. The quest for a new aesthetic paradigm challenges the artistic hierarchies of modernity and puts forward unsettling simulations. In addition, Baconsky's travel notes in the Western world, fallen prey to technology and consumerism, bring to the fore alienating forms of social kitsch. The writer describes the tourist kitsch, followed by the degradation of artistic objects, all summarizing a whole tradition of souvenirs and memorabilia. Moreover, his poetic texts from Corabia lui Sebastian interrogatively stage a reified space where objects look more alive than human beings, while weak individuals read the signs of an apocalyptic world. The literature itself is mechanized and written language becomes the compressed matter of kitsch collage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the “Greek” (videlicet Aromanian) trading houses' archives as a paradigmatic sample, this paper advocates for the proper physical organisation of the archival material specific to old microeconomic entities, and for exorcising the traps set by collections. In order to dismantle the resistances that dictate maintaining these archives in a deficient statu quo, from the perspective of both scientific valorisation (constrained by the graeca non leguntur palaeographic obstacle) and archival treatment (marked by the antagonistic pairs: trading houses versus personal/family archival fonds, accounting books versus manuscripts, archival fonds versus collections), the paper presents the current state of the art and the archival research methodologies (which are not spared, in their turn, from vicious touches), along with successfully employed or failed archival steps, objectives, methods, principles, and remedies. The virtual documentary reassembly ‒ a solution that is useful for research, albeit a compromise one ‒ is displayed in the “Annexes”, by relocating the accounting books into their matrix-fonds and coalescing the series of archives of the Euro-Balkan trading houses that operated in the Romanian territories during the XVIIth ‒ XIXth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the implementation of plurilingualism in language education policy in Serbia, based on Romanian as a case study. The aim is to clarify the place of neighbouring, regional or minority languages in education in L1, and L2 learning, in the multilingual and multicultural context of Serbia which borders Romania. Initially, the paper draws upon interdisciplinary studies on critical sociolinguistics and language education policy in EU, which are marked by language ideologies of linguistic and cultural diversity. Afterwards, the implementation of plurilingualism in Serbia is analysed, the results indicating several interpretations and underlying principles: from ideology of equality and plurality, to ideology of neoliberal economy. It is argued that the first one protects and promotes linguistic and cultural diversity in Serbia through education in minority languages as L1, while the latter one restricts the offer of L2s, in which these appear only at university level. The conclusion advocates for different stakeholders to take into account the missing educational and social value of learning community, regional or minority languages as L2s on all levels of education, and to promote it as beneficial for both minority and majority students, and society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Yearʼs Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Yearʼs Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Yearʼs Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly “irrational” popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Yearʼs Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the “performers” got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Yearʼs Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to sketch a discursive typology of memoirs recounting the traumatic carceral experience of former political prisoners under communism. This is a body of literature which in Romania is at best marginal in studies of communist repression by historians and political or social scientists, as it has attracted more interest from literary people. Students of prison-time memoirs under communism usually operate with a dichotomy between “factual” accounts that supposedly document actual prison life and “literary” accounts that obscure the factual truth by embellishing it for aesthetic rather than documentary purposes. Unlike them, and in keeping with the views of post-Freudian trauma critics like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), or Leigh Gilmore (2001), I posit that traumatic experiences (re)present themselves to our subjectivity as always already translated into a discursive template and, as such, they are already committed to memory as simultaneously “factual” and “literary”. This is a process which I call “traumawork” (Traumaarbeit) and which helps me modify the sequential model of dreamwork transformations (Traumarbeit) from classical psychoanalysis and suggest that the latent and manifest contents are in fact not just coincidental in the written memoirs, but that they were simultaneously scripted (discursively encoded) from the start. I adhere to a subjective constructivist model that insists on the centrality of discourse in the constitution of our subjectivity. This prompts me to conclude that our memories consist of the mnemic imagos which are discursively processed through traumawork. This means that they are poured into different discursive matrices that differ from each other by virtue of the different “master tropes” which they involve (Hayden White 1973, Bogdan Ștefănescu 2018) which function as structuring principles for our representations of traumatic events. These discursive matrices or templates are constitutive of the psychological and ideological profile of each author and furnishes the memorialist with different manners of inscribing carceral life experience in testimonials. By looking at the memoirs by Ion Ioanid, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, Ion D. Sîrbu, Nicolae Steinhardt, and Constantin Noica, I exemplify here three such discursive paradigms - the realist approach of antithesis-driven radicalism, the lyrical perspective which pursues inner harmony by means of metaphoric anarchist type of scripting, and the mannerist concern with thought-provoking antinomies and paradoxes voiced in an ironic-conservative mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the aesthetic canon as a cultural construct or process that involves the whole cultural field, the concept is revisited nowadays in the spirit of World Literature theories. In this sense, there could be seen a rehabilitation of noncanonical genres or the circulation of values in the transnational space in order to cartography the (inter)national canon(s). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific scene from the well-known Lewis Carroll novel Alice in Wonderland (translated into Romanian) from this premises: the instable place in the frames of noncanonical genres or categories and the relationships between literary prizes and the mechanism of canonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both in Guadeloupe and in Seychelles a French-based creole co-exists with French. In addition to this shared main ecological parameter, the two areas diverge in several other points of their contact ecology. While the Seychelles was a British colony from 1814 to independence in 1976, Guadeloupe always remained French and is still a French overseas department. In both areas, the role of creole, the competences and varieties of French and the impact of English on the language contact situation are very different. In the last paragraph of this paper, we present the results of a recent sociolinguistic enquête as to the role of French in the contact ecology of the Seychelles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, a small Akathistos book was presented to me in Paris, printed in Arabic, with Arabic type, with no title page. The owner, a Western antiquary, had no information on the date and place of its printing. Having surveyed the volume for one hour and, later, having at my disposal a few photographed pages, I drew some conclusions from my initial research of this unique book. They led to some potential answers to the many questions connected to its origin and open new paths for the research of the unsolved mysteries that surround it. The book illustration, most of all, offers some clues on the place of printing and the persons who could have been involved in this endeavor. All these elements suggest a direct connection with a press of the Romanian lands, either the one at the Three Hierarchs Monastery in Jassy, or the emerging press at the Monastery of Saint Spyridon in Bucharest. To properly understand the historical background of Arabic printing in the East, several relevant figures and their printing achievements are briefly discussed: Antim the Iberian, Athanasios Dabbās, and Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch. This paper presents the information collected so far in connection with this Arabic Akathistos, and the unknown elements that the on-going research will survey as part of the tasks within the TYPARABIC project that I am coordinating at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global health emergency caused by the covid-19 pandemic has also influenced the linguistic-communicative level, both with respect to the language of the media and in terms of the strategies and choices adopted by decision makers, governments, health authorities, etc., to address the population with information about regulations aimed at behaviors to deal with the moment of danger. In this article, we continue along the line of our previous paper (see Matticchio/ Melchior 2021), in which we briefly analysed the information in Italian published on the official websites of the bilingual institutions of the Istrian Region. After a first introduction to the official bilingualim in the Istrian county, we will focus on the Italian of the pandemic by analysing possible divergent (lexical) choices in the Italian of Istria, trying, as far as possible, to understand whether they are due to the influence of Croatian or to other reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artistic testament and opus magnum of the visionary genius Isaac Leib Peretz (1852– 1915), the Yiddish dramatic masterpiece A Night in the Old Marketplace (“Bay nakht afn altn mark”, 1907, Warsaw) subtly inserts a praiseworthy innovation in the polychrome fabric of European culture: Mitzvah Tantz Makaber or the Danse Macabre of the Commandment. Reinvented as the secondary hypostasis of the Hasidic Danse Macabre, it symbolises a joyfully animated interval of symbiotic sequences (Life–Death–Wisdom). Despite its lugubrious atmosphere, this ephemeral interstice of reviviscency opportunely enlivens the story cleverly constructed by the author. Lauded as the ‘Polish Pan’ of Yiddish literature, Peretz ingeniously interweaves hilarious dialogue, grotesque details, and traditional Jewish spirituality to convey a nuanced message, the final composition ostensibly outlining an elaborate interplay of ludic allegory and profound wisdom. Opting for a holistic approach, my analysis will cover the following essential coordinates: the emergence of the sinister Danse Macabre in the European cultural climate (a medieval allegory preceded by the poematic monologue Vado Mori and The Tale of the Three Living and the Three Dead), superseded by its gradual enrooting into a Jewish context (via the composite cultural medium of ecstatic dance, the archetypal ensemble of the Trickster, and the medieval Speculum tradition), being ultimately reinvented as the Mitzvah Tantz Makaber by the visionary Peretz (his eminently Jewish choreography employs traditional Ashkenazi motifs and extolls Hasidic values). The actual examination of the Danse Macabre of the Commandment, reimagined as the main subcategory of the Hasidic Danse Macabre, will focus on a set of three fundamental phases: the unique way in which Peretz textually illustrates this innovation, the symbolism behind its literary form, and the powerful message conveyed by the parable. In current international academia, the Mitzvah Tantz Makaber allegory needs proper identification and examination. Further lacking an autochthonous translation, the Peretzian dramaturgy remains virtually unknown to the public in Romania. Performed exclusively in Yiddish, the superlative play A Night in the Old Marketplace underwent only two productions on the Bucharest theatre stage (in 1930 and 1970). Consequently, the present paper endeavours to remedy a noteworthy hiatus by examining the outstanding literary innovation of the Danse Macabre of the Commandment as an auxiliary hypostasis of the Hasidic Danse Macabre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is an established discipline. However, it is still debatable whether it is science or art, as it is largely open to interpretation given the reliability of its sources. This paper will analyze the theoretical aspects of history, namely the scholarly concerns regarding the method of history and its reliability and objectiveness, as well as its relation to fiction. Theorists have always had problems in classifying history as a science or as an art, arguing in this regard that fiction is a necessary part of history as the interpretation of sources involves filling in the many gaps with the historian's imagination based on their knowledge of a certain period of time. The past is much too vast and claiming to be able to know it all is an utopia. This paper offers different definitions and perspectives on history with the purpose of proving that history and fiction are indubitably linked. In fact, novels are proposed as complementary sources for the 'official' versions of the past. This paper also provides insight into the recent theories on history and into the way postmodernism views this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper sets out to identify the main characteristics of Marin Mincu's criticism and to restore theories that he never put together systematically in independent volumes, but scattered throughout his work. Numerous articles, literary studies and interviews are reviewed. The bigger part of the paper is dedicated to Mincu's conception of the novel. There are taken into discussion concepts like textualism, the writing's authenticity, semiotic pluriverse and the recovering of the subject's corporality. Besides revealing a poetics of the novel expressed in theory papers, this work synthetically presents an implicit poetics of the genre, as it is laid out in Mincu's novel Intermezzo. The writing's corporal agony - which is at the same time born from its reflection on itself - came better out from Intermezzo, a novelistic experiment which contains its own hermeneutics. The recovering work in progress of the human subject's corporality has as a main effect the literalization of the novel's theory. The being's transfer into the text's letter leads inevitably to the intensification of the vital processes that offers writing an agonic corporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focuses, in connection with the Amélie Nothomb's novel Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam (« Neither from Eve nor from Adam"), on the play between acceptance and subversion of well-known sayings which match to some "ready-made-to-think-right" and "ready-made-to-behaviour". The real author becomes central figure of the fiction and assumes many roles on the enunciation stage as well as on the enunciated ones she makes happen. Jointly, will be explored the dynamics of the identity and, at the same time, the humorous effects stimulated by Amélie's cunning fictional discourse. With reference to these points, will be used the notional framework conceived by the French linguist Alain Rabatel, which could reveal the similarities, also the differences, between humour and irony - two attitudinal ways of the mocking discursive ego. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anglicization of French and Romanian academic marketing discourse (official discourse of stakeholders in national education systems herby included) is a natural consequence of the global domination of English as vehicular language in science and technology, as well as in economics and in media: primary neology, especially in emergent domains (such as Internet, social networking, digital marketing etc.) takes place in English. English has become the global language of scientific research and several university programs are directly taught in English (in Romance language speaking countries) - hence a certain loss of domains for the latter. French and Romanian cultures are not equally equipped for defending their respective linguistic territories, with French institutions far more structured and efficient, even if language planning is quite present in our country also. Romanian linguists are not of one mind about Anglicization. And the loss of domains doesn't seem to bother too much either the Romanian Academy nor the stakeholders in Romanian Education. This paper will only tackle the topics of specific patterns in French and Romanian academic marketing discourse and in the discourse of institutional decision makers in the university education system. After a short overview aiming at the contrastive approach to the notions of Anglicism and Anglicization (beyond the problem of national education's linguistic governance, one should distinguish between Anglicization as anthropological process and Anglicisms as linguistic borrowings from English - loan words, semantic borrowings or syntactic borrowings), we will provide some results of an illustrative corpus research (a manually compiled comparable corpus of 50 French and 50 Romanian text samples in academic marketing, including samples of written discourse by university and national education decision makers). Pertaining to lexical/(terminological) borrowings, we shall insist on their pervasive effects on native polysemy and synonymy, based on the analysis of the French family of synonyms management/administration/gestion (and their Romanian counterparts). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In officially bilingual contexts such as some cantons in Switzerland, the possibility of offering learners a school programme in two languages is regularly questioned. Between the representations of the society, the position of politicians and the potential divergent opinions of the public and the teachers, the implementation of bilingual programme is a long and sensitive process. This paper proposes to study a range of conditions, from the political, didactic and societal spheres, by identifying the role of the institutions, the teachers and the learners. All this takes place in a well-defined context, holding naturally strong cultural and identity values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other phenomenon has affected the natural course of life of the entire planet since World War II until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to implementing the rules generated by the state of emergency or by the state of alert, the citizens are seeking parallel solutions, that function as a refuge, where they can withdraw from fear. Being out of control, this feeling can irreparably paralyse rational thinking. Natively endowed with a very well-developed sense of humour, our compatriots found an opportunity to turn it to account by using their ingenuity. They created a rich inventory of comic texts, which would sweeten the fear of the unfriendly profile of this coronavirus. In this paper we refer to a special type of urban folk literature, generated, as previously stated, by physical isolation at home, but which occurred simultaneously with the exit from latency of a spirit which is thirsty for figment. To be more specific, we analyzed some of the jokes that have circulated on various communication channels (especially electronic ones) and whose invariant theme is the human existence during the epidemic, captured in all its fundamental aspects. A condition for the successful communication of a joke is placing the interlocutors in a familiar context of immediate conceptions, interests and aspirations, which means that both the speaker and the recipient benefit from a common background. On the one hand, we tried to identify the semantic meaning of the texts we took into consideration, and on the other hand, we studied how we are led, "activated" to the pragmatic meaning of the statement through latent, implicit content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in Romanian language are getting more and more appealing to students all over the globe. The learning and training opportunities in equally varied, and exciting fields, both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in our country, have led in the recent years to a significant and steady increase of the number of students enrolled in the groups of Preparatory year of the Romanian language for foreign citizens. Therefore, students from the European continent (UK, Greece, North Macedonia) along with students from other parts of the world (Cuba, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Congo, Kenya etc.) showed their interest in the program offered by the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. The present paper intends to tackle, in a non-exhaustive manner, some grammatical notions of Romanian language as foreign language found at A1-A2 levels, from the program's first semester, and more than that some grammar difficulties encountered during the process of teaching and learning all these. We wish to refer mostly to noun (articulated or not), verb and personal pronoun, insisting on those aspects which are unclear or more complicated owing to the irregular inflectional character identifiable in more inflective lexical-grammatical classes, irregularities that are at times quite difficult to understand by foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To set out with the aim of performing an exercise of reflection on the topic of the contemporary rural human implies a double deconstruction. The first is triggered by the assumption of the rural human's existence as an identifiable and analysable character in the field of thinking and representation. Ranging from symbolic valorisation to the simple deictic gesture, the existence of the rural human cannot be subjected to understanding unless it undergoes a deconstruction exercise. On the other side, a second deconstruction is generated by a positioning issue in the critical field: to what extent are we still contemporary with the idea of rural human in the peasant sense of country life? Further, which are the update conditions of rurality in terms of roles and profiles that may set a so-called common place of the rural human? Once these two deconstructions have been operated, other two interrogative lines emerge as the result of our interpretative effort for reconfiguring a possible discourse on the contemporary rural human. First, it is necessary to understand if reconfiguring the contemporary rural human makes the subject of an update matter of a rural anthropology. And, particularly here, we need to walk very carefully since such a project oscillates between a recovery mission (especially of the rural tradition) and a reinvesting activity (modernizing the rural life in the context of globalization). Secondly, we should avoid placing this type of reconstruction in the urban centrist discourse within the urban-rural relationship. The rural-urban symbolic and spatial continuum is not defined by the antinomic accents of the urban-rural relationship, and, under no circumstances, involves a hierarchy. We need a different approach and understanding of the rurality, rural fact, and rural human in this urban-rural continuum. Which are our speculative resources necessary for such an endeavour? First, we need to identify the mental frameworks we use for representing the rural human. The limits ideologically drawn for understanding and perceiving the rural human. Six of these limits, the most relevant ones, are being discussed in this paper. Their relevance is given by their symbolic and ideological effects and their power of structuring the representations and discourses about the contemporary rural human. It concerns the rural-urban relationship, the rural categories (peri urban, medium, and deep rural), the difference between community and association, the rural human's bond with the agricultural activities, new ruralism, and the relationship between peasant and rural human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has also influenced the linguistic-communicative level, both with respect to the language of the media and in terms of the strategies and choices adopted by decision-makers, governments, health authorities, etc., to address the population with information about regulations aimed at behaviors to deal with the moment of danger. In this article, we continue along the line of our previous paper (see Matticchio, Melchior 2021), in which we briefly analysed the information in Italian published on the official websites of the bilingual institutions of the Istrian Region. After a first introduction to the official bilingualim in the Istrian county, we will focus on the Italian of the pandemic by analysing possible divergent (lexical) choices in the Italian of Istria, trying, as far as possible, to understand whether they are due to the influence of Croatian or to other reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]